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"Life Itself" - Coming to theaters September 21, 2018

Mary L. Tabor worked most of her life so that one day she would be able to write full-time. She quit her corporate job when she was 50, put on a backpack and hiking boots to trudge across campus with folks more than half her age. She’s the author of the novel Who by Fire, the memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story and the collection of connected short stories The Woman Who Never Cooked. She’s a born and bred liberal who writes lyric essays on the arts for one of the most conservative papers in the country and she hosts a show interviewing authors on Rare Bird Radio.
In the picture Mary L.Tabor

I had the chance to see a pre-opening of Life Itself, coming to theaters September 21, 2018,
and, go ahead, call me a sap: I loved it. The critics don’t. Here are early stats: 21% Rotten
Tomatoes, 28% Metacritic, 1.54 Roger Ebert. Critics have even said that Dan Fogelman, who
wrote and directed Life Itself, doesn’t understand how a movie works, the inference being that
he doesn’t understand narrative—when that is exactly what this film is ultimately about.

Dan Fogelman is well-known for Crazy, Stupid, Love, a flick that rings way true and wildly
entertains, and, yes, I loved it, too, and for the television series This Is Us that I have to admit to
not having seen.

So, you can’t call me an out-and-out Fogelman fan. Haven’t seen any of his other flicks either.
So here goes on why I think the critics don’t get the flick Life Itself.

The critics call this film manipulative, perhaps even mannered or affected in the telling. They
miss Fogelman’s central thesis: That art, a story told, a movie watched, a narrative that tries to
make sense of the unspeakable can help us face the curve balls that life throws.

The opening of Life Itself relies on an unknown voice-over throughout its chapters. Yes, the film,
like a novel, works in short chapters, four of them and an epilogue. In the first chapter, the
voice-over tells us, “No one knows where their story is going or who the heroes in it are going
to be.”

That one key sentence describes life but not narration that seeks meaning in the face of
meaninglessness.

In that opening chapter, Olivia Wilde, who plays Abby to Oscar Isaac’s Will, states the premise
in her proposal for her college thesis: She argues, quite smartly, I might add, that the author of
fiction is always an “unreliable narrator,” in some sense, because the distance between what
we write as authors and what is told always involves an artful lie.

I argue that Fogelman is not asserting that fiction lacks emotional truth or that memoir is
better, for that matter. What he is saying is that narration requires a leap, what used to be
described to you by your English teacher as “the suspension of disbelief.”

As a commentary on narration, he and Abby are correct.

Then Abby and the movie go on to assert, to extraordinarily sharp criticism by movie critics that
Fogelman states the obvious, that the “ultimate” unreliable narrator is life itself. From there on
out, the critics take the film apart as trite, sentimental and manipulative. “Get your hankies out
for this Hallmark card” might be another way to state the overall criticism this film is getting
before its city-wide opening.

What they do not get is Fogelman’s subject: The importance of narrative in our lives to make
sense of the unspeakable.

Abby’s professor of literature fails her thesis because, as he asserts, she appears to think she
has wandered into a creative writing class. What the critics miss is this: That is Fogelman’s
point.

What the critics I’ve read could attack but don’t is that the film operates on what we writers
term “the fortunate coincidence” to drive the narration. That may be fair criticism but also
Fogelman’s point.

The key chapters, without revealing the story fully, focus on an accidental death, (one in the
present action of the story and two in Abby’s troubled past), a suicide that results from the
accidental death, a child-witness to the accidental death who later appears in the story as a
grown man, and a death from illness, all in separate tales that ultimately and “fortunately”
become linked in the epilogue.

And I’ll come back to that closing for it is key to the way the narration operates in chapters with
an authorial, omniscient narrator.

Abby, Will’s adored wife, also adores Bob Dylan and his Time Out of Mind album recorded when
he was 56 in 1998 when many thought he might be washed up. Abby tells us how much he was
criticized for including in the series of despairing rockers, a melodic love song ballad “Make You
Feel My Love” and insists, while in bed with Will, that he listen to it, that he pay attention. As an
aside, this song may be Dylan’s most-covered ballad.

On point here, in the movie, the voice-over tells us that even Garth Brooks recorded it. On point
here in this review, the song was called by critics at the time “a clunker,” and that fact is the key
to the narration Fogelman bravely asserts in this flick. Here’s one of the lyrics we hear in the
film: “When the whole world is on your case/ I could offer you a warm embrace ….”

Dylan’s decision to include this gorgeous ballad was not a mistake, as some called it, but his
point.

Life will bring us to our knees says the narrator who is finally revealed as a writer at a reading in
a bookstore for her book entitled Life Itself. This is my story, she says, and there she stands.
She is the storyteller. She is arguably the unreliable narrator of this tale full of fortunate
coincidences that drive the film to its well-earned close.

Admittedly, I reveal here that I have been brought to my knees by the death of my 46-year-old son on November 4, 2017. I’ve been artistically paralyzed: Can’t write, haven’t posted a column here for this year that closes on the memorial of his death in 2018.

But today, as Fogelman and his stand-in author in the bookstore suggest, I got off my knees and
wrote this review of a moving film with brilliant and controlled performances by Annette
Benning as a shrink who sneaks smokes; by Mandy Patinkin as a beleaguered grandfather; by
Olivia Wilde as a joyful Dylan lover and literature commentator; by Oscar Isaac as an
outrageous, oversensitive and endearing lover; by Sergio Peris-Mancheta as a controlled, warm
and loving and nearly martyred spouse; by Antonio Banderas as an unlikely hero with one of
the longest soliloquys in the film, beautifully done.

Yes, life is unreliable. Yes, life sometimes is unbelievable. Yes, life will bring us to our knees.
And, yes, this much-criticized film will get you in the heart, but not through the manipulation it
is being criticized for, but through its narrative insight that shows us how, despite all that brings
us down, a story can get us to see that we must get up off our knees.

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